by TE Carter
He wrapped his arm around my waist as he led me out of school. “Trust me, Ellie.”
We drove to the river, to a house that sat right along the water. “It’s not mine,” he said as we pulled into the driveway. “We’re fixing it. No one lives here anymore.”
“Fixing it how?” I sat in his car, wondering if I should be sitting there. If there were unwritten rules about what you were supposed to do when a guy like Caleb asks you randomly to hang out in an abandoned house.
“My dad gets them from the banks or whatever and we keep ’em up. Then, eventually, we give them back. When they have their shit together, I guess.”
“What about the people who own it, though?” I asked. “What happens to them?” I knew what happened to them. My dad still talked about it. I’d seen it. But I wanted to hear it from Caleb’s point of view. What did they think happened to the lives they cleaned up?
He shrugged. “Not our problem. Besides, they left. This one here? They just walked out. There’s stuff in the closets still.”
I thought of my dad. Of the things he’d said about the people he’d known. I thought of watching our neighbors across the street. Of how their daughter, who was only a few years older than me, begged them to let her have more time. How she cried because she hadn’t known and she hadn’t had enough time to get her stuff.
I thought of the mornings my dad and I went fishing and of how we probably stopped going because of the Breward boys. Because they reminded us just how much they owned. I thought of all the things my father would say about me sitting in a car with Wayne Breward’s youngest son, about how he’d feel about us trespassing in these people’s home. Even if it wasn’t really theirs anymore.
“What’re you thinking about?” Caleb asked, and he smiled.
I wish I could say I told him all the things I thought about. That I shared those stories so he would know what he was really fixing up. I wish I was that kind of girl.
But I guess I was a sucker for a nice smile.
“Nothing,” I said.
Inside, the house had been left in the middle of existing. The dining room table and chairs were dusty, but the place mats and dishes were still set. The overhead chandelier was off, since there was no electricity, but the sun came through the window and flickered off the glass.
I reached across one of the faded curtains. A spider crawled out from behind it, disturbed by our being there.
“It’s weird,” I said, walking into the kitchen and turning on the faucet, running my hand through the invisible water. “It’s like they planned to come back.”
Caleb came up behind me, wrapped his arms around my waist, and leaned into my ear. I didn’t mind his closeness. He smelled like pine, for some reason, and he was warm. I liked the way he held on to me. How it felt like belonging when he wrapped himself around me that way. It felt like someone wanted me to be a part of them. Of their space.
But it was still a surprise. And I wasn’t sure I was supposed to feel how I did, so I shrugged him off and leaned closer to the window over the sink, trying to see if there were signs of anyone left.
Caleb moved to my side and looked out the window with me. “People don’t like letting go,” he said. “They weren’t coming back. They just didn’t want to see it empty.”
“It’s so quiet.”
Without the normal whirring sounds of daily life—the refrigerator, the electric lightbulbs and their strange almost inaudible buzz, the creaks of people moving in their chairs from another room—the house was a silent box of memory. A place that was. Outside, a squirrel ran across the porch, where leaves had gathered and died.
“Come on. We’re almost done with the upstairs,” Caleb said. “It’s less depressing.” This time, he didn’t grab my hand. He simply waited and offered it. I looked out the window a bit longer, until the squirrel ran away, out of view, before turning to Caleb. The afternoon sun shone in his eyes, steel sparkling when he smiled at me.
I took his hand and let him lead me upstairs. He was right. The rooms were painted and clean. They had the soulless feel of a furniture display in a department store, but at least it wasn’t like having the ghosts of other people wait for us to stop invading their space.
We walked down the hall to the master bedroom. The bed was still there. Unmade because they’d taken the sheets but otherwise intact.
Caleb threw himself onto it and gestured for me to join him.
“I probably shouldn’t,” I said. I wasn’t sure I was supposed to lie on a bed with any boy, especially one I’d just met, and worse, in a stranger’s bed. I’d spent enough time in Catholic school to know that good girls didn’t do those kinds of things.
With Caleb, I both liked the way he tried to make my choices for me and hated how he made me feel uncomfortable. But it was a strange feeling. I was drawn to him, even when I didn’t want to be. Probably because I was at the point where I watched enough movies with my dad to see how people fell in love. To see how they kissed and held each other. To know I wanted someone to look at me that way.
“Ellie, come here,” Caleb said from the bed, taking up most of it. “I won’t do anything. I promise. I’ll be good.”
I shook my head and walked to the window again. From upstairs, I could see across the yard. A swing set of rotten wood and an aboveground pool with only three remaining sides stood between the house and the river. I lifted the window, letting the sound of water fill the room.
“Ellie.”
“It doesn’t feel real,” I told him.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like being in a story. This house. It’s someone else’s story. I feel like we’re intruding.”
“Hey, turn around.” I did and he sat up. “I’m allowed to be here. We’re not doing anything wrong.”
“Maybe,” I said. I couldn’t explain it. There was what was legally okay and what I felt. Someone had lived here. Someone had loved here, and we didn’t belong in that.
The water was the only sound for a while. I leaned against the wall, the breeze tickling my elbows, while Caleb lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. I started to take inventory of him. Who he was. What he looked like. How he moved.
“I really like this house,” he said finally, still not looking at me. “This is my favorite we’ve done.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
He moved onto his side. “There’s so much still here. It’s still real. I guess it’s like pretending. It’s like being someone else. Have you ever wanted to be someone else?”
I nodded, but it bugged me. I felt like he shouldn’t be able to read me so easily in three days. Then again, I told myself, maybe that’s how people are. Maybe that’s how you find the right people. They’re the ones who know what you feel in a moment, without ever needing to say the words aloud.
Caleb reached an arm out. “Come here, Ellie. Please? Come pretend with me.”
It takes a lot of things to make a girl, but breaking her? It only takes a few pretty words and a crooked smile.
chapter eight
Another night.
Another girl.
She’s older. They usually like them young. She has hollow eyes, though. Hollow eyes in a hollow girl in a hollow town.
She’s silent and it makes him angry. They expect them all to cry. They all do, except this one refuses.
His hands move so fast. I remember them. His rage running down his arms, gathering in his hands. They’re clean and pretty hands. Manicured maybe. He goes to someone and pays them to clean off the girls he hurts.
“What’s your problem?” he asks as he hits her again.
She only smiles. In other circumstances, I would admire her. I’d want to be her friend. I’d want that kind of strength in my life. But I don’t admire her now. I hate her instead. I hate her for being strong. I hate her, because I should have been strong, too.
He fills the wall with more damage, because hitting her gets no response. Plaster dust settles on his manicured han
ds and he clenches his fists by his side.
“Fine. You want to play games?”
They never go for the face anymore. They prefer their damage to be hidden, to be in the places you need to protect. They want you to feel shame if you show anyone. They’re careful to hurt you only in the places you’ve been told to keep private.
This girl is different, though. She fights back. Not physically, but she smiles instead of crying. Still, I see it all in her eyes. The pain. The fear. I know fear; it’s present here in this room all the time. I live alongside it. It’s all I have to keep me company.
“Bitch,” he says, and he pushes her down.
My jeans cost $18 and my father had to work two hours to pay for them. They were weak. Like me. This girl’s pants must have cost more, because he has to work harder.
What eventually breaks her isn’t his fists. It’s not what he does. Or what he plans to do.
He hurts her by saying her name.
“Gretchen.” He says it like a lover says a name, but he doesn’t touch her like a lover should. His face is so close to hers.
That night, his breath smelled like alcohol.
“Don’t say my name,” she pleads. There it is. The begging. The need. It’s what he thrives on. It’s not crying, but it’ll have to do.
“Gretchen,” he says again.
He asked me my name. But he never used it. He still doesn’t use it. I wonder if he even remembers it.
“Fuck you,” she replies, and I close my eyes. I hear the echo of his hands. The walls will remember tonight.
I’m scared. Both for her and for myself. I don’t want him to continue. I want her to be allowed to leave. I don’t want to share this space.
She’s only so strong. She fights as much as she can, but eventually he wins. She’ll get to go home. She’ll hide the bruises. She’ll keep smiling, even though she’ll forget how to mean it.
After.
That’s what I know now. I only know the existence of after. That, and a mess of memories that don’t make sense alongside each other.
Life happens in the strangest moments. It’s a calendar of days, pages of time folding one over the other. The memories become stories, and they fill us up until we can’t be filled anymore. That’s all I was left with. Nothing to fill the space but my hurt and all the things I remember.
It’s not all bad, though. There’s as much beauty as there is pain. I keep my eyes closed and I surround myself with the memories of what was good. I fill after with before. With the memory of coming home from school and lying on my bed with Fred. While he chewed my textbooks and I worried about paying for them at the end of the year. I fill space with thoughts of stolen sips of coffee in the first golden streaks of morning. Memories of violins and candy canes and the funny way you look in the mirror when you run your hand through the misty residue after a shower.
I remember all those things, and I think of them instead. I try not to hear what’s happening, try not to remember the parts I want to forget. I think of the good and I try to forget $18 jeans and the way I asked for it and knowing it was all going to happen anyway.
chapter nine
After the day by the river, Caleb didn’t talk to me again. I saw him around school, but he didn’t acknowledge I was there. He didn’t even look at me when we ran into each other in the math hallway. I smiled at him, and he saw right through me. I tried not to let it hurt. I told myself it was only one day. One day means nothing. It wasn’t personal. That’s what I let myself believe. That it wasn’t because I was the kind of girl no one would ever want more than one day with.
I want to say I made a lot of new friends, that I didn’t look up every time I heard his voice in the hall, didn’t feel like crying when I saw him flirting with someone else out of a line of girls.
He’d called it pretend. I should’ve known it was.
There were kids I talked to, sure. I asked Doug Martindale for notes when I got the flu. Sometimes I sat with Heather O’Neill at lunch. She was allergic to pretty much everything, so she had to have which days she came to lunch preapproved. During the rest of the week, I sat alone. But when I sat alone, no one pointed and laughed. I was no longer the girl forced to be by herself. I was just a girl who existed, nothing more. It was better than it had been, even if it still hurt that I could have disappeared and no one would have noticed.
I talked in class. When they called on me. And my words faded into the din of school. Nothing memorable. Boys weren’t poking at me anymore, and girls didn’t call me fat. I didn’t find notes in my locker making fun of my clothes. They didn’t call me names. Smelly Ellie or Ellie the Belly. They just didn’t call me anything.
The thing was, Kate hadn’t failed. I blended in. That’s what I’d told her I wanted. And it had been. I’d thought it would be enough to fade into the wallpaper. But then, there was an afternoon by the river with a boy who called me cute and wanted to fill his day with me so badly that he wouldn’t take no for an answer. And now, I wanted more.
But what I wanted didn’t matter.
In the time that followed, I learned about plot diagrams and the Roman Empire and boiling points. I was filled with the things that made a person. Made a girl.
Holidays came and went. I stayed home and watched ’50s monster movies with my dad on Halloween. We had turkey sandwiches from the deli at the store for Thanksgiving, before he went in to work overnight for the Black Friday sales. At Christmas, he gave me a pair of parrot earrings. I’d loved parrots when I was twelve. I gave him a new set of windshield wipers.
I told myself not to wonder what Caleb was doing. What kind of world existed for people like him. I tried not to think about it as the year changed into the next, tried not to wonder if I’d ever know what it was like to belong somewhere.
As life does, it went on until it was spring. My blue hair faded, although it didn’t go away completely. The dark roots came in, but there were still pieces of matted blue at the ends. My head looked moldy.
I was at my locker again, trying to remember what homework I had that night. I didn’t feel like digging out my planner to check, but I was afraid I’d forget something. I was a good student. I sort of liked school, but that wasn’t why. I was a good student mainly because I didn’t have anything else to do.
“Elusive Ellie, where the hell have you been?”
I turned around, quick-scanning the hallway. Maybe I’d heard him wrong. It had been months.
Caleb stood in the doorway to the science lab, filling the space between the hall and the room. I hated how he smiled and my heart hoped. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t okay that he wasn’t even someone I knew. He didn’t want to be around me, and yet when he smiled and I saw his eyes crinkle up as he watched me, I couldn’t help but wish there was an explanation.
“Um, here?” I said.
“I haven’t seen you around.”
He crossed the hall, oblivious to the people passing. Our school population had dropped, even in the year I was there. We’d lost twelve students since September. Soon, there’d be nobody left in Hollow Oaks.
The door to the science lab closed behind him as he approached. Sometimes it seemed like the entire world waited for him to possess it, then shut down when he was finished.
He stood in front of me, reaching out to close my locker. “What have you been up to?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, leaning back against the neighboring locker, holding my books to my chest. Caleb put his arms on either side of me, his body closing the space between us.
“I’ve missed you.” I could feel his breath when he spoke. I looked to the side and his hands were only inches from me. There was no space left that was mine.
“You seem to be doing just fine without me.”
“Don’t be like that, Ellie,” he said, reaching a hand up to grab the back of my head. “You never called. It’s been months. I wondered if you forgot all about me.”
My brain kept rationalizing. Reminding me I knew ve
ry little about Caleb Breward, and most of what I did know wasn’t great. It tried to show me all the days he’d passed me in the hall and wouldn’t look at me. My brain had a long list of amazing reasons I should have walked away, but Caleb’s closeness did things inside of me I didn’t know how to process. All the rational thoughts were there, but then I wondered what it would be like if he leaned just a little closer and kissed me.
I went to Catholic school. I had only my dad and my dog to keep me company. How I felt with Caleb inches from me, his mouth slightly open, was terrifying. But I didn’t move. I kind of liked being terrified. I thought this was what it felt like to fall in love. I thought this was why they called it falling, because I couldn’t seem to stay grounded when I just wanted him to kiss me.
I tried, though.
“You didn’t give me your number,” I reminded him.
He spun away from me, and I exhaled while he leaned against the locker beside me. I waited for him to tell me why today. Why he’d remembered me now.
“I’m so bored,” he said. “This is boring.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Not you. This.” He swung his arm out to indicate … something. The school? Our town? Life?
“What are you doing Saturday night?” he asked and turned back to me, but he didn’t give me time to reply. Since my reply would have been something along the lines of eat a sandwich and watch a movie, it was probably best I was silent. “Gina Lynn’s having a party.”
I knew of Gina Lynn, but I didn’t know her. She was the kind of girl Caleb would know. She was the kind of girl who expected people to call her Gina Lynn.
“Good to know.”
He smiled. “I’m asking you to come with me, Ellie. I wasn’t reciting a calendar.”
“Oh. I mean, I’m not invited.” Gina Lynn wasn’t mean to me or anything. She didn’t even know I was alive.
“I just invited you. So you’ll come?” he asked.
I couldn’t see myself there, but I wanted to picture it. I imagined being the kind of girl Gina Lynn and Caleb talked to at lunch. How would the world be different for that girl?